VMware Tools Memory Leak Issues

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
Over an extended time period, the vmtoolsd process is seen to use increasing amounts of guest memory when the vSphere APIs ListGuestAliases and ListGuestMappedAliases are used.

Resolution

To resolve this issue:

Upgrade to the latest version of VMware Tools - https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2004754

Generally, the versions 11.0.1 and later of VMware Tools and open-vm-tools regardless of the OS include fixes. For Tar Installer or OSPs for Linux versions that do not ship with open-vm-tools, you can upgrade VMware Tools to version 10.3.21 or later.

For open-vm-tools, OS vendors have also included fixes in their latest package updates outside of VMware Tools' release schedule. The following table shows the package versions that include fixes for the memory leaks:
 

Linux OS	11.0.x	10.3.x	10.2.x	10.1.x
Debian	2:11.0.0-1 (unstable)	2:10.3.10-1+deb10u2 (buster)	No	No
Ubuntu	2:11.0.5-4	2:10.3.10-3ubuntu1	No	No
OpenSUSE/SLE	11.0.5-4.21.1	(no 10.3.x in SuSE)	No	No
Fedora	11.0.0-4	open-vm-tools 11.0.0 packages are available for all supported Fedora releases (Fedora 29 and later).	No	No
RHEL	11.0.0-4.el8	10.3.0-2.el7_7.1, 10.3.10-2.el7, 10.3.10-3.el8_1.1	10.2.5-3.el7_6.1	10.1.10-3.el7_5.2
Photon 2		10.3.10-4.ph2	No	No
Photon 3		10.3.10-3.ph3	No	No